Springer: "You couldn't pay off the debt in 50 years even if you confiscated the entire US populations combined wages and wealth. "

That is absolutely false. Here are the numbers:

Current debt $17.5 trillion
2015 tax revenues: $3.5 trillion

10% of $3.5 trillion = $0.35 trillion

17.5 trillion/0.35 trillion = 50

50 payments of 10% of our current tax revenues would completely pay off our current debt. Change the number as you wish (55% of taxes paid, and100 payments, for example). We can pay off our debt, if we really want to do that. I thought you were always telling us that we needed to cut benefits and services. wouldn't this be a good reason to do that? Are you now changing your mind and telling use that you want to protect benefits and services?

The price of a loaf of bread in terms of sheer owed amount is unequaled

You can cry, wail and hide your head in the sand all you want, or you can look at the facts, stand up, look at the problem that we face, and decide to fix it. If you want to pay off the national debt, there is a way to do it. It just takes a little savvy, courage, and a willingness to stand up for one's country - things we should expect of all Americans.

In percent of gdp and wages, the debt after WWII was larger than the debt is now. We have not yet paid off the debt from WWII (or Korea, or Vietnam, , or the Mideast). The last time the national debt was zero was in the 19th century.

But that doesn't mean that we couldn't pay off the debt, entirely, if w wanted to do that. Write your representatives and tell them you want to pay off the national debt, and that he should write a bill to add a 10% rider to the taxes collected to pay off the debt. If we did that we could COMPLETELY pay off the debt in less than 50 years. You were i the military, weren't you, and you did take at least your share of tax dollars? You do drive on tax funded highways, don't you? Maybe it's time to pay it back now.

Our current 17.5 trillion debt will do the same thing to our children and grandchildren that the highest ever debt (at the time) in in 1946 did to us. (It was even higher, then, in terms of wages and gdp).

Let's wait and see how long it takes before they begin to discuss their top Republican priorities in Congress, which seem to include the economy, jobs, ISIS and terrorism, the debt and deficit, taxes, and probably immigration, too. They seem to have pulled back on discussing an abortion bill. Whee do they go next?

Only 36% of registered voters even turned out to vote, and only about half of them voted for those who won. Who know what the other 2/3 who didn't vote think = although it's clear that many of them don't care much at all.

That's not the case, Lang. There was a water infrastructure bill that passed Congress and was signed by the president last year. It required American made components for various water projects. And NAFTA does not tell builders what they can or can't use in their projects. NATA simply states that there will be no duties charged for materials that are taken across our international borders in North America.

Is buying American no longer a good thing, for construction in the USA? The Canadians have control over how their stretch of the pipeline is built. Why not do the same thing here? The Canadians can built any pipeline they want in their country, any way they wish. The bill before Congress now is only in support of the very long section from the Canadian border to Texas.

Lang, I agree that ethanol is probably a dead end solution. It's only advantage is that it displaces some fo the fossil carbon, while using carbon recently removed from the atmosphere by the corn plants. (But it sounds like Brazil's problem is their power grid, not the fuels they use.)

As far as wind is concerned, it is very competitive with other energy sources now. A recent study shows the cost to generate electricity from a few sources, after subsidies have been subtracted out. This is what they found, as of 2013:

In the end, I think your 20% premium is way too high. Wind and solar will need to compete on an equal level, with close to a 0% premium, in the long run.

The numbers above will continue to change. Solar power costs have dropped by 99% over the past 20 or 25 years, for example, and it will continue to drop. Likewise, wind costs have dropped as well, and will continue to drop. The biggest advantage of solar and wind is that you don't need to spend billion transporting a fuel across hundreds or thousands of miles.

You need to give those gravity theory deniers a little slack, amoulits1. A lot of them learned that the gravity theory was actually real when they were working on their roof, assuming that gravity was just a theory. Misinterpreting too many theories and sometimes you can get hurt bad.

2014 is most likely the warmest year in recorded history, and if it wasn't, the difference was about a hundredth of a degree. if it wasn't 2014, it was one of the other top ten globally warmest years of the past century :1998, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2013. It's not easy to calculate the average global temperature to the hundredth of a degree, but it's really easy to calculate average global temperatures to a quarter degree or tenth of a degree over the past decades to show what the direction of change is, and 2014 is certainly right at the top.

So, where's the lie? As best we can measure and calculate the number now, 2014 was the warmest year in recorded history.

Yep, and if it wasn't 2014, it was one of the other top ten globally warmest years of the past century :1998, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2013. It's not easy to calculate the average global temperature to the hundredth of a degree, but it's really easy to calculate average global temperatures to a quarter degree or ten of a degree over the past decades to show what the direction of change is, and 2014 is certainly right at the top.

As far as CO2 levels are concerned, the times of the ice ages were the times of the lowest CO2 levels, 200 ppm, or less.. Higher CO2 levels occurred between the ice ages, and before them. The highest CO2 levels, according to recent scientific studios were during the Jurassic period (180 million years ago), and Ordovician period (440 million years ago), when the CO2 levels got up to 4,000 or even 5,000 ppm. But, if that happened now, palm trees would be growing on the remaining land at the poles, and we would see deserts over wide swaths of the middle latitudes. The oceans would be hundreds of feet deeper, too. Some humans might survive such a drastic change, but they might be cooking their dinners over open fires., Coastal cities from Miami, to Houston, to Seattle, would all be under water, and millions of people would have moved inland to find places to build their fires.

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